“A cradle, then.” I had read of men using rocking boxes during the rush down in Georgia.
Errol scoffed. “The Swede’s asking a hundred dollars for one, you fool.”
“We’ll build our own. Work twenty times as much rock through it.” I held the mustard jar, shaking it like a babe’s empty rattle. “This is the place.”
Errol hovered over his ruck where he was rolling it. “You’re certain?” I knew what he was asking by the way he asked it. He harbored such reverence for my visions that it changed the way he spoke. “You’re certain?” he repeated.
What I was was homesick and hungry and bone tired. But my brother made no allowances for that. “I’m certain,” I said.
Errol dropped his sack and clapped me on the back. “Ho, ho!”
A more decent man would have been troubled to see his own brother go giddy at such a lie. But my conscience was waylaid by his gratitude, which caused a sudden sting in my heart. I had long known my brother had brought me to California not for my strength or my intellect or even for my company. He had brought me so that my auguries could make him rich.
I’d never found the fact troubling; it was in keeping with the way he’d been to me as long as I’d been alive. But what comfort it would have been, I thought now, if but once on this long, torturous journey he had intimated that he wanted me along to help him, because we were brothers. Brotherhood had never been on his mind, and for the first time I hated that it wasn’t. I hated that he only considered me of use when the visions overtook me. And in this thinking I saw his cure and mine: I would find our gold. I would tunnel my way to his affections. I would make him love me in the way of brothers.
I removed my spectacles, pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. “I have seen it,” I said. “Oh, I have seen it.”
VII. A CRADLE AND ITS TROUBLES
Back home we could have built a cradle in two hours for two dollars. But lumber was scarce and expensive so we had no choice but to cut our own. From the Swede I procured a saw, a hammer, and some nails, all on credit. Errol and I worked steadily at the cradle for three days, a lifetime in the gold hills. Once he took a step back to assess our work, the crude box set on rockers. “I must admit,” he said, “I never imagined I would be caught a bachelor fashioning a cradle in the womanless wilds.” I knew about the branch of juniper he’d notched, a notch for each of the thirty-six days since he’d dispatched his last pitiful letter to Marjorie. But he seemed in good spirits as we worked, and I softened toward him. He had a winning way about him when he chose.
With the cradle finally assembled, we saw that it would indeed move more rock, that neither of us had accounted for just how much rock it was capable of moving. The problem, however, was that the cradle required constant rocking in order for the gold to be captured in the riffles while worthless sediment passed them by. For a day we tested different arrangements. First we had Errol rocking away while I attempted simultaneously to dig the pay dirt, scoop it into the hopper and pour river water over the sediment so that its finer particles might be strained through the canvas apron. Inevitably I would run out of either sediment or water and have to fetch some more, at which point the slurry would stop streaming and our momentum would be lost. The cradle, ingenious a device as it was, depended on a steadier rocking-and-pouring than we two alone could maintain.
Errol, seeing the imperfection of our new method, became frequently agitated, and would often curse me, take the shovel from my hand and push me to the handle. Attempting to man both the shovel and the bucket on his own, Errol would see quickly what I saw: our operation was a man short.
“This won’t do,” he said finally. “We’re just rinsing the soil.”
I nodded.
“We need more hands,” he said.
I might have made that observation twelve long and fruitless hours earlier, were I not sure he would smash up all our hard work in a fit. “What about the Chinamen?” I said.
Errol shook his head. “I won’t split with them.”
“And what’s our choice? Split nothing fifty-fifty. Fifty-fifty salt pork and gruel? Fifty-fifty sleeping on the ground?” I cast my shovel to the ground. Now I was agitated, and from the corner of my eye I saw the elder Chinaman pause. “Do you know what we owe that Swede?”
Errol returned me the shovel. “You don’t become a man of society by keeping quarters with Orientals.”
VIII. THE FIRST COACH
When we rose in the morning the diggings were deserted. I trudged sleepily up and down the bank in my long johns. The place had gone a ghost town. Upriver each claim was abandoned, pans half sifted, the wooden handles of shovels jutting like masts from where their heads had been thrust into the soil. Downriver was the same, except for the Chinamen, who worked on same as ever. I approached the father, aware that Errol was following.
“Where’s everyone gone?” I said. I pointed to the manless claims. “Where are they?” The Chinaman began to speak in the tong language, which I had never heard. The sound was most bizarre and impenetrable.
Errol interrupted him. “Has there been a strike?” he said loudly.
The Chinaman pressed his lips together, then began to speak again, slowly. And again, the language was entirely incomprehensible.
“A strike! A strike!” shouted Errol, hopping and flailing his arms in the general direction of the mountains. “Has there been a strike, you old fool?”
“No strike,” came a clear, effeminate voice beyond the commotion. We turned to see the boy standing on the banks, holding his pan of woven straw. “He say, ‘A coach. In the night.’ ”
We stared like idiots.
“Mail,” the boy said.
Errol took off.
“Thank you,” I said to the boy. “You know ‘thank you’?”
“Yes,” he said.
I dressed and followed Errol along the trail to Angel’s Camp. Out front of the Swede’s a monstrous crowd had gathered around a stagecoach. There were men in numbers I had never seen, hundreds of men not only from our fork of the American but from all of Calaveras County. They were the roughest specimens I have ever seen, and nearly every one of them brandished a revolver or a musket.
The driver of the coach had climbed atop the cab and was arbitrating the rowdy crowd from that position. In his hands he clutched a distressingly small bundle of letters. Errol attempted to pry his way to the heart of the crowd. He pushed between men, struggling to get within shouting distance of the coach. Surely without thinking he shouldered past a ruffian at least half a rod tall with a beard grown down to his chest. The man — a Southerner — informed Errol that he had occupied that spot since before sunup and that he was unlikely to forfeit it to Errol or to anyone. For proof he showed Errol his Bowie knife.
It was then that we noticed that from the mob grew a tail of men. There were too many men to approach the coach at once, and we weaklings had been dispatched to wait in line. We followed this tail through town and out of it, finding its end finally in the woods, behind two Mexicans.
We stood in line for half a day. By the time we came back in view of the coach, emotions had reached the breaking point. Full-grown rough-and-tumbles shouted their names up to the driver and trembled while he searched his bunch. Men who had no letter waiting — and these were the majority — cursed their wives or friends or family for forgetting them. Some desperate fellows offered the coachman flakes in exchange for a missive, as if one might be conjured for the right price. But this was the one place in California where color held no sway.